The formation of the chemical contaminant, acrylamide, during high-temperature cooking and processing of wheat, rye, potato and other mainly plant-derived raw materials was reported in 2002, and the presence of acrylamide in foods is now recognized as a difficult problem for the agricultural and food industries. Acrylamide causes cancer in laboratory animals and is therefore considered to be probably cancer-causing in humans. It also affects the nervous system and reproduction. Cereals, of which wheat is the most important, generate half of the acrylamide in the European diet, with biscuits, snacks and breakfast cereals being of particular concern. The FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives has recommended that dietary exposure to acrylamide should be reduced and the European Commission is expected to issue guidance values on acrylamide levels in food before the end of 2010. The current draft of the guidance values proposes levels that will not be consistently achievable for many products. The proposed guidance level for breakfast cereals, for example, is 400 parts per billion (ppb), while levels in some wheat-based breakfast cereals are over 1000 ppb. Furthermore, many Member States support these guidance values becoming regulatory limits. The food industry therefore requires both short-term solutions and a long-term programme of reduction in the acrylamide forming potential of wheat in order to comply with this regulatory situation as it evolves. Methods for reducing acrylamide formation during processing have proven to be difficult to apply to wheat products, either being ineffective or having an unacceptably adverse effect on product quality. The development of commercially viable wheat varieties that are low in acrylamide-forming potential but retain grain characteristics that are important for end product quality would help to address, at source, the problem of acrylamide formation in food manufacture, catering and home cooking, without the need for additives or potentially costly changes to processes. The high-temperature degradation of an amino acid, asparagine, in the presence of sugars (glucose, fructose and maltose) has been shown to be the major route for acrylamide formation and the limiting factor in wheat products is free asparagine. Wheat contains significantly higher levels of asparagine than most other grains. Furthermore, whole wheat grain and wheat bran, which have important health promoting properties, tend also to have higher asparagine levels than refined wheat flour. This project seeks to identify currently available varieties and genotypes of wheat that are low in asparagine and provide wheat breeders with the genetic tools to reduce the concentration of asparagine further. This application is being submitted through the BBSRC's stand-alone LINK scheme. The project will benefit from the involvement of a major European/GB wheat breeder and a consortium of wheat supply chain businesses, allowing for the identification and review of key targets by the industrial partners. The level of industry support is indicative of the importance of the acrylamide issue to wheat supply chain businesses and the potential impact of the project. A letter of support has also been provided by the Food Standards Agency. The project will use state-of-the-art techniques for analysing amino acid concentrations in wheat flour, exploit the genetic resources in wheat that have been developed at Rothamsted and the John Innes Centre, including mapping populations, wheat genetic modification (as a research tool) and high-throughput screening of mutant populations, and utilise the latest DNA sequencing techniques to study differences in gene expression between high and low asparagine genotypes. The impact of reductions in acrylamide-forming potential of grain on performance in industrial processes will be assessed by food industry partners.

This application requests funds to continue and develop the EngD in Formulation Engineering which has been supported by EPSRC since 2001. The EngD was developed in response to the needs of the modern process industries. Classical process engineering is concerned with processing materials, such as petrochemicals, which can be described in thermodynamic terms. However, modern process engineering is increasingly concerned with production of materials whose structure (micro- to nano- scale) and chemistry is complex and a function of the processing it has received. For optimal performance the process must be designed concurrently with the product, as to extract commercial value requires reliable and rapid scale-up. Examples include: foods, pharmaceuticals, paints, catalysts and fuel cell electrodes, structured ceramics, thin films, cosmetics, detergents and agrochemicals. In all of these, material formulation and microstructure controls the physical and chemical properties that are essential to its function. The Centre exploits the fact that the science within these industry sectors is common and built around designing processes to generate microstructure:(i) To optimise molecular delivery: for example, there is commonality between food, personal care and pharmaceuticals; in all of these sectors molecular delivery of actives is critical (in foods, to the stomach and GI tract, to the skin in personal care, throughout the body for the pharmaceutical industry);(ii) To control structure in-process: for example, fuel cell elements and catalysts require a structure which allows efficient passage of critical molecules over wide ranges of temperature and pressure; identical issues are faced in the manufacture of structured ceramics for investment casting;(iii) Using processes with appropriate scale and defined scale-up rules: the need is to create processes which can efficiently manufacture these products with minimal waste and changeover losses.The research issues that affect widely different industry sectors are thus the same: the need is to understand the processing that results in optimal nano- to microstructure and thus optimal effect. Products are either structured solids, soft solids or structured liquids, with properties that are highly process-dependent. To make these products efficiently requires combined understanding of their chemistry, processing and materials science. Research in this area has direct industrial benefits because of the sensitivity of the products to their processes of manufacture, and is of significant value to the UK as demonstrated by our current industry base, which includes a significant number of FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) companies in which product innovation is especially rapid and consumer focused. The need for, and the added value of, the EngD Centre is thus to bring together different industries and industry sectors to form a coherent underpinning research programme in Formulation Engineering. We have letters of support from 19 companies including (i) large companies who have already shown their support through multiple REs (including Unilever, P+G, Rolls Royce, Imerys, Johnson Matthey, Cadbury and Boots), (ii) companies new to the Centre who have been attracted by our research skills and industry base (including Bayer, Akzo Nobel, BASF, Fonterra (NZ), Bristol Myers Squibb and Pepsico).